Lee Christofis

Anastasia (Royal Ballet)

ABR Arts • 28 October 2016

Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia is one of several full-length dramas he created on his return to the Royal Ballet in 1971, after directing the Deutsche Oper Ballet in Berlin. It is a hybrid work, incorporating as its third act a famous one-act Anastasia that MacMillan created in Berlin in 1967. A shy man who suffered debilitating stage fright, MacMillan was an outsider by nature. His empathy for s ... (read more)

Nijinsky (The Australian Ballet)

ABR Arts • 12 September 2016

No twentieth-century male ballet dancer has sparked as much adulation and scholarly investigation as Vaslav Nijinsky. Graduating from the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg at eighteen, this sexually ambiguous, rather remote man, became the darling of Russia's principal ballerinas. By twenty he was the love object and protégé of Sergei Diaghilev, the alchemist who concocted the Ballets Russ ... (read more)

Romeo and Juliet (Houston Ballet)

ABR Arts • 04 July 2016

To open its Melbourne winter season, The Australian Ballet has invited the handsome and talented Houston Ballet to make its Australian début in Romeo and Juliet by Houston's Australian artistic director, Stanton Welch. After reaching leading soloist and resident choreographer status in Australia, Welch joined Houston Ballet in 2003. He will always be remembered here for revolutionising balletic e ... (read more)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Queensland Ballet)

ABR Arts • 04 April 2016

How appropriate that Queensland Ballet is playing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 400th anniversary year of William Shakespeare's death. This is not the Royal Ballet's production by Frederick Ashton for London's 1964 celebrations of the Bard's birth but a co-production with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, which successfully staged the world première last year. The choreographer is Liam Scarlett, d ... (read more)

Lee Christofis reviews 'The Sleeping Beauty' (Australian Ballet)

ABR Arts • 18 September 2015

When Sergei Diaghilev staged The Sleeping Princess at the Alhambra Theatre, London, in 1921, he hoped to prove that classical ballet could be as popular as the outrageously glamorous West End hit, Chu Chin Chow, which ran for five years. Diaghilev invited the brilliant colourist Leon Bakst to design sets and costumes equal to those of the original 1890 St Petersburg production, choreographed by Ma ... (read more)

Lee Christofis reviews 'Fantasy Modern: Loudon Sainthill's Theatre of Art and Life' by Andrew Montana

February 2014, no. 358 • 19 January 2014

Reading Andrew Montana’s new biography of Loudon Sainthill leaves one imagining how much the artist would have achieved without his lover, amanuensis, and entrepreneur, Harry Tatlock Miller. Lovers for some thirty-four years, they seem destined to achieve remarkable things together. Well into his project Montana realised that he could not tell Sainthill’s story without Miller’s, and so Fanta ... (read more)